People’s Choice Poll on MyGov India – Winners of AatmaNirbhar Bharat App Challenge
The Swadeshi Movement was started on August 7, 1905 in India by great leaders – Aurobindo Ghosh, Lokmanya Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Bipin Chandra Pal, Lala Lajpat Rai, primarily for promotion and use of Swadeshi or indigenous goods in the country.
In May, 2020, our Hon’ble Prime Minister gave the clarion call for Bharat to become AatmaNirbhar or self reliant, which resonates with the ethos of the Swadeshi movement. Rising in response, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology in collaboration with Atal Innovation Mission, NITI Aayog started the ‘Digital India AatmaNirbhar Bharat App Innovation Challenge’ which was launched by our Hon’ble Prime Minister on July 4, 2020.
The Challenge saw participation from a whopping 6,940 tech entrepreneurs and start-ups across the country, from not only the metro cities but also Tier II & Tier III towns. The entries were in 9 different categories namely Business, eLearning, Entertainment, Games, Health, News, Office and Work from Home, Others and Social.
An eminent Jury panel comprising of some of the best minds from Industry, Start-ups, Academia and the Government was constituted to judge the entries. The innovative Apps were evaluated on parameters of robustness, scalability, security and ease of use.
On August 7, 2020, the top performers made a final pitch to the Jury and showcased their novel solutions, through a mega hackathon, streamed LIVE on the MyGov India platform. Alongside this, MyGov India launched a People’s Choice Poll on August 7 itself, for the citizens of India to vote for their favourite Apps and share it on Social Media. The Poll was open to the public for voting till August 15, 2020.
The People’s Choice Poll has now been completed, and India has voted for their favourite Apps. The Results of the People’s Choice Poll are hereby declared. Heartiest Congratulations to all winners from MyGov India.
In the Business category, Mall91 has won the 1st position. It is a full stack Community Commerce Platform for the next 400 million users moving online. Using an innovative concept of group discount buying and last mile agent driven community logistics at pin code level, Mall91 is able to bring locally manufactured products at cheapest prices to this new cohort of users, taking ecommerce to the nooks and corners of India. Close on its heels is Zoho Invoice, Books & Expense in the 2nd position. Zoho Books is a cloud accounting platform wherein Businesses and accountants can easily access their data from anywhere, at any time. What’s more, this helps in collaborating with accountants, sales people, and other stakeholders who are not physically present. Zoho Expense is a GST-compliant, online expense reporting and management application, built to streamline expenses, simplify approvals, and speed up reimbursements while Zoho Invoice is a GST compliant invoicing software that offers everything users need, to simplify their business invoicing. It helps users create professional invoices, send payment reminders automatically, and receive payments faster. These apps primarily help organisations manage their back office operations and finances, customer/ vendor payments, inventory management, banking, employee expenses, regulatory reporting, GST filing, compliance etc. GimBooks- Easy Invoice Manager is a cloud based Mobile First book keeping and business management platform, which helps users to create, share and manage documents like GST complaint Invoices, E-waybills, Quotations, Purchase orders and various other documents required in day-to-day business. The App secured the 3rd position in the Business category.
In the eLearning category, Hello English: Learn English App has won the 1st position. The app is aimed at democratizing learning for the next billion. It is an AI-powered, voice-led learning solution for English with job-outcome oriented communication skills. It makes learning personalized to each learner’s starting level. The 2nd place has been taken by Kutuki Kids Learning App, which is a pre-school kids interactive App, with a mixture of song and story based learning, games and activities. This enables children to build a strong foundation in language, basic math and science as well as build social skills and aid cognitive development; not only this, it is 100% Indian made, 100% for Indian kids, Safe and Ad free. Securing the 3rd position is Disprz Live which is an AI-powered skills and career acceleration suite for mid-sized and large enterprises. It helps create business impact by enabling organisation-wide re-skilling, up-skilling, and cross-skilling. Leveraging AI, cloud and mobile, it helps identify trending skills for every role in any industry, skill gaps, and create impactful learning pathways combining in-house and industry content.
And for the witty and the humorous among us, here’s an app to tickle your funny bone- MemeChat. The Jury loved it and so have the janta and therefore, no guesses about which App has topped the Entertainment category. For the uninitiated, Memes are a new style of communication and more and more people are using it to express and share hilarious content with their friends. Users can now create memes in a simple and user friendly manner using templates available on the App which aims to become a part of the unique meme culture and facilitate its growth. The FTCTalent App has secured the 2nd position in this category. It is an app that operates an online platform for all production & content sourcing requirements for the media and entertainment industry, ranging from actors, singers, dancers, to directors, producers, technicians etc. Amid fear of losing jobs during the covid-19 pandemic, the App envisages to provide much relief to the freelancers, with the UI/UX features on the App allowing for online application, audition, cast selection process while the User Generated Content (UGC) engine helps in connecting the talent with recruiters. And the 3rd position has been secured by CaptionPlus, an App created with the vision to provide a search engine of most trending and catchy Instagram captions, which can complement photos, adding a spark to every Instagram post of a subscriber. The platform becomes more interesting to use because of its AI engine that automatically suggests most suitable captions and hashtags for the uploaded image. Packed with a plethora of features, CaptionPlus poses to be an excellent platform for budding writers as well who can contribute their captions for use by millions around the globe.
If you are a cricket enthusiast, then some of the Apps that are winners in the ‘Games’ category are right up your gully. The 1st place has been secured by World Cricket Championship 2 (or WCC 2 as it’s also known) an advanced mobile cricket game engine supporting a large number of features, tournament formats, game modes and live ops. World Cricket Championship 2 is home-grown ‘Made in India’ game, played globally in over 150 countries including UK, Australia, USA, UAE, Sri Lanka, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Hitwicket Superstars has secured the 2nd place. This AI powered mobile game aims at democratizing the game of cricket by empowering the cricket fan whether a kirana store owner or a college student, to be more than just a spectator; it allows users to partake in a global cricketing phenomenon and display their strategic acumen. User is also the owner, coach and captain of a virtual cricket team competing with users across the globe in a multi-player league. The 3rd place goes to ScarFall- The Royal Combat; this app is the very first online and offline battle royal strategy game that is graphic heavy with exciting game play. Along with real time voice and text chat, ScarFall is available in 15 different languages to offer a localized experience for players worldwide.
And for the fitness freaks, here is an App in the “Health’ category to boost your immunity and motivate you to stay fighting fit. StepSetGo is a comprehensive fitness app that tracks user’s fitness levels by counting steps walked, distance covered, and calories burned. The app motivates, engages and pushes the user to move more every day with the use of tangible rewards, gamification, and social interaction. The app’s aim is to promote healthy habits among the general Indian population and make India’s citizens, more fit. Citizens of India have naturally considered it befitting to grant the first position to StepSetGo. The 2nd position has been secured by iMumz, a pregnancy companion App which has been designed to improve physical, emotional, social, spiritual, and intellectual wellbeing of user. iMumz app, has a nine month Baby Care Program which includes a healthy diet, meditations, baby bonding exercises, and many more for the essential care of baby and mother.
If you want to unlock a world of learning for your child, “IsEqualTo” is your answer. It is the first age-appropriate, bilingual daily news app for children. Over 7,000+ short, easy-to-read articles are available for students in classes 1-5 in English and classes 6+ in English and Hindi. The App allows children to improve their General Knowledge and aptitude skills, revise better with interactive question and answer banks, develop awareness with short easy to read News and General Knowledge articles and is perfect for the curious learner ! IsEqualTo has secured the number 1 rank in the ‘News’ category. And for your daily dose of News, download ‘Logically’, an App that not only informs you with news from all sides of the political spectrum but also helps fight ‘fake’ news with AI-powered fact checking and image verification. Packed with features such as getting short effective news summaries of facts without bias, thanks to their AI which reads hundreds of articles on every story and summarizes the facts to save users time, ‘Logically’ gives users the option to even change location and get unbiased news from different sources. ‘Logically’ has secured the 2nd place in this category.
Zoho Cliq & Workplace has topped in the “Office” category. Zoho Workplace provides a unified platform of email, team cloud storage, online office suite and video meeting applications while Zoho Cliq is an instant messaging and team collaboration application with file sharing and audio/ video calling capabilities. Together, they act as an online workplace enabling employees to meet, collaborate and get their work done. The 2nd position goes to SureMDM, a one-step solution for managing, monitoring, and securing all business endpoints – regardless of make, type, operating system, or ownership (COD or BYOD). Apart from helping businesses ensure data and device security by turning devices into dedicated-purpose tools, this device management solution also allows IT administration to troubleshoot devices, push content and system updates to devices, and wipe business information off non-compliant/stolen/decommissioned devices remotely. Thus, IT administration can have greater control over business devices, facilitate remote working and improve user productivity.
And if you want to give wings to your literary skills and pen down your thoughts albeit digitally, YourQuote is your answer. It is a micro-blogging platform, which caters to over 40 Lakh writers creating original content in 12+ languages. Additionally, all posts are searchable on Google as your quotes and YourQuote helps claim copyright for original content. The app has topped in one of the most popular categories- Social. The 2nd place has been secured by Chingari, which is a short-video sharing platform wherein people can record and share short duration videos. Chingari is an App through which users can showcase their talent to the digital world ! It allows users to upload videos in more than 20 categories; supports languages such as English, Hindi, Bengali, Gujarati, Marathi, Kannada, Punjabi, Malayalam, Tamil and Telugu. The 3rd position goes to Koo, which is an Indian micro-blogging platform that has best minds of India expressing themselves to Indian followers, in their mother tongue, using audio/video/text.
The 9th category in this Challenge was ‘Others’. And the first position goes to the MapmyIndia Move App: Maps, Navigation and Tracking. The 2nd place is awarded to AskSarkar while the 3rd position is secured by myITreturn. MapmyIndia Move is India’s super app for maps, mobility, safety, hyper local social discovery etc., which offers in one app itself, India’s most detailed house number level map search, real-time traffic and safety based navigation, safety monitoring of vehicles and loved ones on the move, hyper local social discovery of nearby places of interest, and map-based hyper local issue reporting by community member to help government and local authorities as well as businesses fix issues faced by citizens and consumers on ground.
AskSarkar is a Chatbot platform which is a Personal Digital Assistant to give authentic information about Government Schemes, Policies, Benefits, Scholarships, Jobs etc. The chatbot is multi-format i.e. Video, Voice, Text Chatbot and Intelligent Virtual Assistant supported and Omni-channel – Web, App, WhatsApp, IVR, SMS, Social Media Bots, Live Chat. What’s more, it is multilingual – works with 12 vernacular & 100+ foreign languages.
myITreturn is an app developed with the aim to increase the reach of Income-tax return filing to maximum Indians and to simplify the process of online Income-tax return filing. The app is built in 10 popular Indian languages to remove any language bar and complexity while filing IT returns. myITreturn is registered with the Income-tax Department to help taxpayers. Use myITreturn app and stay updated with prior-year return filing status, track pending refunds, get monthly TDS updates, check for outstanding tax demand and also plan their tax savings.
And finally, out of all the top performing Apps, citizens of India have voted for their most liked App. This prestigious position is awarded to none other than MemeChat.
In this first of its kind App Innovation Challenge, world class “Made in India” Apps have been created, some of them from enterprising tech savvy women. This heterogeneous App Challenge saw one constant- Excellence; all gave astounding performances, getting high ratings and wowing the Jury, and Public, alike.
On the whole, these effective solutions will empower billions globally especially during these unprecedented times, ensuring ease, convenience, and security. Needless to say, such Challenges will chart a new path towards making our Bharat “AatmaNirbhar” and will continue to immeasurably change the digital narrative in the country.
